Happy City UK are one of a whole host of astroturf groups supported by government in order to lobby government for more government.
– Perry de Havilland
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The quote is from a comment to this article (that I found from instapundit). The commenters – Californians who have decided to vote with their feet – complain they’ve seen one too many
They expect to be as annoyed by NC’s right-wing politics as by CA’s left-wing politics. It may be just their way of expressing it. And I suppose it will be a culture shock (understandable they’ve not moved to Texas, or Alabama – or Samizdata 🙂 ). But I have a hard time imagining being as annoyed by politics that will allow me to dissent as by politics that will punish any hint of dissent. But maybe that’s just my typical right-wing focus on the honesty of the process rather than the nobility of the goal. May 22nd, 2019 | 31 comments
 In the internet age, for a political party to get their message out, talking to the Old Media is an option, not a necessity. – Perry de Havilland May 21st, 2019 | 11 comments
Over the last two days there has been a spate of milkshakes being thrown at UKIP and Brexit party candidates. It has become a meme. Many Remainers have spoken out against this, but others are loving it. For instance the Independent‘s political sketchwriter Tom Peck writes, “Nigel Farage getting hit by a milkshake isn’t funny, it’s absolutely hilarious”. The restaurant chain Burger King has got in on the act, tweeting:
Burger King evidently believed that this tweet would make their brand more popular with Remainers and Scots. Were they right? I know members of both groups who are insulted by that assumption, but we shall see. Whoever sold the eggs to those among the Muslim protesters at Anderton Park Primary School (where there have been demonstrations and counter-demonstrations about LGBT education) who then went on to throw the eggs at the LGBT protesters could have taken their tone from Burger King and used it as a springboard to sell more some more eggs, but didn’t. Why not, you ask? Would not being known as the go-to place for getting eggs to throw at protesters add to their cachet among cool young readers of the Independent? Oddly, no. You just have to understand that for some categories of person to have food thrown over them while they peacefully advocate for their cause puts them in the same bracket as those who endured this in order to desegregate lunch counters in the US. But for other categories of person, to have food thrown over them makes the thrower into the equivalent of a heroic Civil Rights protester. Best find out which category you are in before you next go to Burger King. Of all the chucklesome reactions to the great milkshake fight of 2019 there was one in particular that struck me as promising even more fun for the future. All we have to do to get that future is vote correctly. Before I get to that, let’s have a break from all this laughing and read a line or two from the Labour manifesto from 2017: – From page 80 of For the Many, Not the Few: The Labour Party Manifesto 2017. Fine words. Karl Turner MP may well be the one tasked to bring them to reality should Labour form our next government. He was at one time Shadow Attorney General. That is, he was lined up to be chief legal adviser to the Crown and Government. Given the lack of legal talent in the Labour Party he may yet be the next Attorney General. This is what Karl Turner MP (Lab) said on Twitter today:
May 20th, 2019 | 31 comments
So says the first line of the Guardian‘s report on the unexpected victory of Scott Morrison’s Liberal-National Coalition party in the Australian federal election.
As I have said once or twice before, my level of belief in CAGW is two-and-a-half letters to the left of most people here. If you are curious, “CAGW” stands for Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, though as of yesterday the Guardian‘s style guide has changed “Global warming” to “Global heating”. Yes, a rebranding exercise. All that is needed now is a shiny new logo and twitter handle and success is assured. After all it worked for What with this result in Australia and the French gilets jaunes movement born out of anger at a carbon tax on fuel, does anyone else get the impression that the latest burst of upping the political ante on climate change works splendidly right up to the moment when it meets the voters? For those who do truly believe that the peril of global warm.. heating is imminent and severe, it is time to get real. It is time to face the fact that drastic changes in lifestyle are necessary; that sacrifices are going to have to be made. Yes, it is time to drop your enjoyable revolutionary delusions and face the fact that if climate change mitigation is to happen at all it will be done within the capitalist system. May 18th, 2019 | 42 comments
“In the past few decades, digital pornography has been blamed for—well, pick a noun and add the word sex. It’s been named as a culprit for both sex addiction and sex abstinence. It’s been blamed for poor sex education, rampant sexual violence, and rising sexual dysfunction. Pornography is practically the Swiss Army knife of social calamity.” – Derek Thompson, The Atlantic. Reminds me of the old gag: Why was the Swiss military so optimistic about the outcome of a war? May 17th, 2019 | 42 comments
Here is very British YouTuber Dr Jake explaining the tax implications of monetising a YouTube channel: On having to pay an accountant, file paperwork for self-employment, spend hours finding and filing receipts, throw himself on the mercy of a Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs amnesty, pay hundreds of pounds in back-dated tax and spend hours every year filing paperwork so he can pay a large proportion of the small income he gets from his hobby business to the state, he says:
I would go on an extended rant about the unseen consequences of all this, but as usual, even thinking about tax and its complications has sucked out all my enthusiasm for anything. I think I will go and have a cup of tea instead. May 16th, 2019 | 16 comments
A month late, I found this video by “Change Britain”, a pressure group founded by leaders of the Vote Leave campaign: The montage consists of politician after politician saying that the government would do whatever people voted for in the referendum, that there would be no second referendum, that the UK would leave the European Union on March 29th 2019, and so on and so forth, liars that they are. It is very effective… if you know your politicians by sight. When it comes to spotting the Lesser British Politician in its natural habitat I would get my Brownie badge, but even I could not name all the distinguished lawmakers shown in this montage. This matters. That effective video would be twice as effective at naming and shaming lying politicians if it, er, named them. This ties in to what I said in my earlier post, “Some examples of promises that Remainer MPs made to get elected and then broke” about the importance of having the damning quotes in written as well as video form:
To that end, here are the names that I could provide, together with party and role: 0:01 David Cameron, Conservative, Prime Minister at the time of the broadcast If you can supply the missing names, please let me know in the comments. Besides naming the parcel of rogues, the other point of this post is that, while a video is better than text for making your point with emotional force, if you want to make that point spread far and wide, it pays to back the video up with writing. Subtitle it, caption it with the names of speakers, and write down significant timestamps as the “sticky” maker’s comment to the video so people can search for the clip most relevant to them. For instance I was particularly interested in the words of Sir Keir Starmer that “The referendum is clear and has to be accepted. We can’t have a re-run of the question which was put to the country”. Sir Keir Starmer KCB QC (he got the knighthood before becoming a Labour MP and would probably now prefer it not to be mentioned) is the Great White Hope of the anti-Corbynite, Europhile section of the Labour Party. Sir Keir is spoken of as the next leader, and he is certainly more intelligent and in most matters less fanatical than its current leader. Even some socialists would prefer their party be led by a member of the Order of the Bath than by a man who looks like he needs one. Do not welcome Sir Keir into your hearts just yet. He was the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time of the Twitter Joke Trial. And, of course, a man who first said that “The referendum is clear and has to be accepted. We can’t have a re-run of the question which was put to the country” but weaselled out of that as soon as the wind changed. Sir Keir Starmer’s weaselling should be widely known. I am grateful to Change Britain for bringing it to my attention. However I was only able to find out that Starmer had once said that “the referendum is clear and has to be accepted” because (a) I am the sort of person who watches two minute montages of politicians lying about Brexit, (b) I already knew that Sir Keir is currently one of the Labour party’s leading advocates of a second referendum, and (c) I am one of the 5% – make that 1% – of British people who can put a name to his suspiciously handsome face. The remark in question is thirty-six seconds in if you want to check it for yourself without watching the whole montage. Seeing a certain short extract from a montage video is a thing people might often wish to do, so, makers of montages, make it easy for them. If someone reading this wants to send a Starmer-struck friend a clip of that video starting at that very moment, pause the video, right click, and select “Copy video URL at current time”. Update: Thank you Alex, Mr Ed, Peter Briffa and Martin Keegan for all the names you have supplied. The one remaining name that I am not sure about is the chap at 0:53 (actually 0:52) who I tentatively ID’d as ex-Tory now-Independent Nick Boles. The name of Ed Balls of Labour has been suggested (he of the sacred Day) – unless I’m mixed up about which talking head Peter Briffa was indicating. But while I’ve lost confidence in naming the mystery man as Nick Boles, he doesn’t look like Ed Balls to me either. Another update: Martin Keegan has identified him as Peter Kyle, Labour. I created a YouTube channel for myself specifically in order to add this list of names to the Brexit Betrayal montage. If you are on YouTube and agree that putting names to faces for this montage of dishonest MPs is a useful thing to do, please consider liking my comment. It’s currently the most recent one. A final thought: the only MP or ex-MP there whom I would exempt from the charge of dishonesty is David Cameron. He has many faults, including dishonesty on other matters, but so far as I know he has not tried to backtrack on the commitment to adhere to the result of the referendum he himself called, little though he liked the result. May 16th, 2019 | 28 comments
Stephen Fry isn’t part of the alt-right. Nobody in their right mind believes he is. Anybody who says something this stupid is just virtue-signaling, performatively reminding the other members of their tribe that they don’t belong to the other tribe. Their eagerness to be more #woke than the next guy and/or gal drives them to say idiotic things like, “Stephen Fry is a racist.” May 15th, 2019 | 45 comments
BBC should be abolished, not because of blatant bias but because the whole idea of a state broadcaster was a terrible idea on day 1 of the BBC’s existence. And in the internet age, it is now an anachronistic bad idea. Bin it entirely or at least make it voluntary subscription – Perry de Havilland May 14th, 2019 | 28 comments
I did the blogging equivalent of buying shares in Dominic Frisby quite a while ago now. More significantly, from Frisby’s point of view, Guido Fawkes has been boosting him, most recently by remembering this heartfelt ode to Nigel Farage. See also this other Brexit-related song by Frisby. Now, it seems that another Frisby comic song is in the pipeline. Concerning this, Frisby tweets:
Theresa, are you reading this? Of course you are. I know that you are planning to step down as Prime Minister any hour now, because you have been listening carefully to what people like this have been saying. But I urge you, Theresa, for the sake of your country’s Comedic Future (see above), to hang on in there for another week. Force yourself. (Delingpole agrees.) (This bloke, on the other hand …) May 13th, 2019 | 4 comments
In between the torturous Brexit process, May’s government has been busy implementing her interventionist vision. Take the minimum wage, first introduced by the Blair government in 1999, which the Tory party long ago dropped opposition to. But now, Chancellor Philip Hammond, supposedly a member of the more free-market wing of the party, is considering hiking the minimum wage from 59% to 66% of median earnings, which would make it the highest in the world and mean that a quarter of British workers would be paid a government mandated wage. – ‘Creative Destruction’ on The looming death of the Tory Party May 13th, 2019 | 25 comments
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